LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY – October 7-9

It has been a week since Pinnacle’s Principal of Asset Management Solutions, Sean Rosier, and Vice President of Client Solutions, Nathanael Ince, returned from exhibiting at the Society for Maintenance & Reliability Professionals (SMRP) Annual Conference in Louisville, KY. Dedicated to developing and promoting excellence in maintenance, reliability and physical asset management, the annual conference provides attendees with unique opportunities to advance their knowledge through a variety of workshops, special events, track sessions, exhibitions and certifications.

This year, yet again, the conference did not disappoint! We met new connections and were able to reconnect with a handful of familiar faces who returned to either exhibit or attend this year. We had a lot of great conversations at our booth and as always, we wanted to bring you back the topics that received the most attention during the three days we spent on the expo floor.

Our message this year was:

Making Asset Management Work:
The Right Data, The Right Strategies, The Right Decisions.

Data was our heavy hitter. Almost everyone who we conversed with brought up data in some form or another. Let’s get into a few of the pain points revolving around data and we heard:

Pain Points Around the Expo Floor

“My master and asset data are not clean, therefore I can’t leverage my systems to make decisions.”

Not being able to trust your equipment lists, hierarchy, attributes, design, spare parts and performance data can cripple you from gaining key insights into MTBF, subsequently preventing you from making informed decisions such as what maintenance to do in the future.  Regardless if it’s in the field, in digital format or in a file cabinet, it is crucial to gather and clean up your data.

“I’m not sure how to utilize machine learning for reliability and maintenance.”

Consider deploying machine learning at your facility and select the right assets to pilot to prove value and then implement the software and analytics and facilitate change management to integrate it with your overall work processes.

“I’m not confident in my reliability and maintenance improvement roadmap or I don’t have buy-in from decision makers.”

Benchmarking and program gap closure assessments can quantify business value and link it to a practical program improvement plan. This helps unify business decision makers with the reliability and maintenance professionals that need help improving their program.

“I suspect I have issues with my asset data and PM/PdM strategies but not sure how to move forward.”

Sample assets at your plant, perform a full data and Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) analysis on those assets, and build a business case to show how much downtime risk and maintenance spend is resulting from poor data or non-optimized strategies.

“I don’t think our warehouse is optimized or organized.”

Develop your Bill of Materials, perform Spare Part Interchangeability Reports (SPIR), and implement demand-based stocking analysis to ensure you have the right parts at the right time.  Establish and implement part preservation programs and streamline your warehouse logistics to prevent your teams from wasting time waiting on parts and more time being productive in the field.

“I want to make sure my capital projects incorporate reliability.”

Perform system modeling such as Reliability, Availability and Maintainability (RAM) studies and implement Reliability Centered Design (RCD) during the engineering, design, and procurement phases to ensure design is optimized with reliability in mind. Set up your asset hierarchy, perform RCM, optimize your spare parts, and put everything in your management systems before startup.

We Will Be Back

In addition to our time on the expo floor, we attended the opening Keynote Presentation given by Aron Ralston, the fearless adventurer and subject of the film 127 Hours. Aron roused the audience with his story, leaving us with an inspiring takeaway: overcome life’s challenges, no matter how large or daunting one’s “boulder” may be.

We are committed to helping our clients conquer the boulders and challenges we face throughout the years. We look forward to heading to Columbus, OH next year for the 28th Annual Conference to continue actively participating in SMRP. Stay tuned for more information and we look forward to seeing you there!

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